The new global poverty line (of living on less than $1.90 a day) captures income and consumption data. What it doesn’t reflect are other conditional circumstances and deficiencies that strip opportunity and hope from the poor.Continue Reading ›
How does Compassion measure up to the ideas about the global poverty industry presented in the documentary ‘Poverty, Inc.’?Continue Reading ›
What does poverty mean to the poor? What does poverty mean to you? What does poverty mean to God?
A major success in a poverty-reduction goal for the new millennium — halving the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 per day — was probably reached three years ago.
A survey conducted in Niger in 2002 by the Office of the Prime Minister asked the poor of that country to describe poverty. Their answers included: dependence, marginalization, scarcity, incapacity and restrictions on rights and freedoms.
How big is the problem of extreme poverty? Three billion people worldwide and 1 billion children deep. But despite the size of those numbers, many people at Compassion believe that we can eliminate extreme poverty in our generation, that we can remove or utterly destroy it.
You might think we’re “drunk on the spirit,” that our goal is unrealistic, completely irrational or even not Biblical, and I will be honest with you, I thought it was out of I thought of it as an impossible task, too.
Being a mother takes courage. Being an expectant mother in desperate poverty takes courage and so much more.
Each year more than 500,000 mothers die in childbirth or from pregnancy complications, most of which are preventable. The babies who survive while their mothers die are much more likely to die in their first year of life.